'How long ago was he spotted?' Audrey asked.
'Not very long,' Rich answered. 'A female jogger noticed him in the water just after sunrise. Her name's Johnny something-or-other. You should be able to get her name and address from dispatch. We found him wedged against one of the pilings under the pier. It took a while for us to drag him back out into the open.'
While Audrey did her thing, I, along with several uniformed officers, searched the pier and areas of nearby Myrtle Edwards Park. As far as I was concerned, the possibility of finding any relevant evidence seemed remote. Considering the impact of currents out in the bay, the victim could have been murdered miles from where he'd been found. Still, we went through the motions of treating the whole area as an official 'crime scene.'
The other officers were still combing the area when Audrey finished with her preliminary examination. I hurried back over to where she stood, stripping off a pair of latex gloves. 'Any I.D.?' I asked.
She shook her head. 'Our Mr. John Doe has no I.D., no wallet, no money, and no rings on him, although he's worn two rings recently. One is missing from his left ring finger, and one from the right. His watch is gone, too.'
'So we may be talking robbery here, or else that's what we're supposed to think. And chances are, our victim was a married man.'
'Chances are,' Audrey agreed.
'Rich was right about the bullet hole?'
Audrey shuddered and nodded. 'Unfortunately, yes.'
I looked at her warily. Crime scenes don't usually affect her that way. 'What's the matter?' I asked.
'Remember back a few months ago when I took that leave of absence?'
'Yes.'
'I worked for two weeks as a volunteer in Bosnia, trying to identify the bodies that were found outside a Muslim enclave that had been overrun by the Serbs. Those two weeks gave me a whole new understanding of the words execution-style slaying.'
'And that's what this is?'
'Looks like it to me.'
I could see that the murder had affected Audrey in a way she hadn't expected. 'Any sign of a struggle?' I asked, hoping that answering routine questions might help Dr. Cummings regain her composure.
She shrugged. 'The body's been in the water for some time-several hours, anyway. The abrasions we're seeing could be from a struggle of some kind, or they could be from being washed around on rocks and/or pilings.'
At the street end of the pier, a slate-gray van, part of the medical examiner's fleet, edged around the barrier and started down the dock. A television-camera truck tried to follow but was headed off by a uniformed patrol officer. Sighting the van, Audrey pulled herself together. 'We'll get him loaded up and out of here, then.'
'Anything else you can tell me that might help us hook him up with a missing person's report?'
'Blue eyes, blond hair, six one or so. Tattoo on the inside of his right wrist. It says MOTHER.'
'Not very original,' I said.
'They never are.'
I waited until the body was loaded in the van. When they left, so did I. It crossed my mind that it had to be a slow news day in Seattle with nothing much to fill up the allotted airtime, since a flock of television cameras stood waiting on the sidewalk when I made it back to Alaskan Way. One of the reporters, a woman, came tripping behind me like a puppy nipping at my heels as I headed back to the car.
'Detective Beaumont,' she called after me. 'Can you tell us whether or not this shooting is gang related?'
Who told you it was a shooting? I wanted to ask her. And, who said anything about gangs? 'No comment,' I said. If she was out looking for a 'lead story' for the evening news, she was going to have to find it without any help from me.
Holiday traffic was almost nonexistent as I drove down to the Public Safety Building. I found on-street parking in a loading zone a mere half block from the front door. Up on the fifth floor, in my cubicle in Homicide, I used my handy-dandy laptop to fill out the necessary paper in jig time. There wasn't much to report. I called down to 911 for the name and number of the early-morning jogger who had called in the report from a cellular phone. The 298 prefix on Johnny Bickford's home number meant her phone listing was a relatively new one on Queen Anne Hill.
I dialed the number, but there was no answer. I declined to leave a message on voice mail. Cops dumb enough to leave voice mail messages with potential witnesses are almost as likely to get calls back as encyclopedia salesmen.
Two and a half hours after I left home, I drove back down Third Avenue toward my building through the wide, flat streets of the Denny Regrade. Because of the one-way grids, I had to go as far as Broad before turning over to Second. My heart fell when I rounded the corner at Second and spotted a fire truck parked directly in front of the entryway awning to Belltown Terrace. A KIRO television crew from Third and Broad was hustling across the street in front of me.
The girls! I thought at once. Worried that something awful had happened to them, I slammed the Porsche's tires up against the nearest sidewalk, sprinted across the street, and made for Belltown Terrace's canopied entrance. In order to reach the door, I had to push past the news-film crew, including the same lady shark of a reporter I had last seen down on the street at the end of Pier 70. A momentary spark of recognition passed between us as she realized that for the second time that day, I wasn't going to answer her damned questions.
Kevin, one of Belltown Terrace's more recent doormen du jour, hustled to let me in.
'Where's the fire?' I demanded.
'No fire,' Kevin replied.
'Why the fire truck, then? What's wrong?'
'The party room is full of soapsuds. The suds finally stopped flowing, but not before they set off the alarms. Now the fire department is trying to clean up the mess and figure out where it all came from.'
'Soapsuds?'
Kevin nodded. 'Scads of them. Mountains of them.'
Kids, soapsuds, and hot tubs can be a real pain in the neck. Some time when you have nothing to do for the next six hours or so, try putting half a bottle or so of dishwashing liquid in a Jacuzzi and turning on the jets. Within minutes, you'll have a hell of a mess. I know, because Heather and Tracy pulled that stunt once before, or at least one of their friends did when she was invited over for Tracy's eighth-birthday slumber party.
Ron and Amy lived on one of the higher floors then, in a unit with a Jacuzzi tub in the master bath. As a result of that little escapade, we had discovered a flaw in the building's plumbing design. The drainpipes for that side of the building go straight down to the garage, where there's a sharp elbow. The suds had backed up at the elbow and had come bubbling out the drainpipe and vent in the party-room kitchen.
I had assumed that having lived through the aftermath of that crisis, Heather and Tracy would have learned their lesson. But faced with a repetition of that earlier offense, I immediately assumed that the girls had once again staved off high-rise boredom by running some of my Palmolive liquid dishwashing soap through the Jacuzzi.
Bent on wringing their scrawny little necks, I bounded into the nearest elevator and pressed the button labeled PH. For Penthouse. Nothing happened.
'Sorry, Mr. Beaumont,' Kevin explained. 'The elevator's off right now. You see, as soon as the alarm goes off, the elevators return to the ground floor and…'
I didn't hang around long enough to listen to any more of peach-fuzzed Kevin's useless explanation. He was still going on about it as I dashed into the stairwell and started pounding my way up one flight of stairs after another.
Twenty-fifth-floor penthouses are swell. The views are spectacular, as long as you don't have to walk all the way up. I was upset when I left the lobby. By the time I staggered up to my door and stuck the key in the lock, I was winded and furious. As the door swung open, I could hear the drone of the television set coming from the den. The air was thick with the smell of freshly popped microwave popcorn.
I charged into the den to find the two innocent-looking wretches sitting side by side and cross-legged on the floor. A stainless-steel bowl of popcorn nestled between them.
'All right, young ladies. What exactly have you two been up to?'
Tracy's eyes grew wide. 'What do you mean? We popped some popcorn,' she murmured. 'Just like you said
